I am hella didactic tonight so listen up.

[tocryabout]

Man, this is why left-brained people shouldn't be allowed to do basically anything. Put them all in camps, I say. No, I have not thought this opinion through. That's not how I roll.

I used to believe every word of these methods, because I had no confidence in my own ability to plot. I still don't consider plotting my greatest strength, but I'm better. That's mostly because it has finally gotten through my head that:

(a) rigorous, airtight plotting like this guy promotes is not necessary for every sort of story. Look at motherfucking Hamlet. Is it meticulously plotted? Not really. Will even seems to have forgotten some crucial story details between the first and fifth acts. He certainly could do intricate plotting, as the comedies show. It just wasn't necessary for Hamlet, because the external events are not really why the story is good. So who the fuck cares how Hamlet got back from England? Pirates, what the hell. You know you're still going to stick around to see what this brilliant crazy hot tortured Danish prince is going to do, and more importantly, what he's going to THINK, what he's going to SAY. Plot is not story. Plot is story's bitch.

(b) there are broken stories and then there are BROKEN stories. This physicist nerd rightly points out that you can easily waste tons of time on a meandering draft before you figure out that the story is just fucked. But. There is a point right in the middle of a difficult plot where the thing seems impossibly tangled, and that point is when you really do have to stick it out. Aphanes certainly can't be accused of having a convoluted plot, but in the middle of it I was convinced that I couldn't fix it, couldn't write a convincing ending for it. But the unconscious will work this stuff out, and with a sudden pop everything falls into place and you don't see what was so difficult about it. And your unconscious cannot do this sort of work before you've started the draft. Fuck you, it just can't. Characters act completely different in outlines than they do in drafts. They promise to behave and do logical things and be very respectable, and you're all, "Okay, if you're sure the NYTBR will like you, then I guess we'll do this thing." Then before you know it they're pulling ridiculous shit and you send them to a party with their best friends and they start strangling each other and your outline is useless.

So the upshot of all that is that if you don't start off on the page with the real people and the real story, you don't give your brain a chance to solve those unsolvable problems. I used to reject stories just on the basis of, "Oh, I love this, but I can't make a coherent plot out of it. So I won't start writing it."

Sometimes you do invest the time and you find out that the story really was fucked. I have been writing terminally broken stories since I was 14 so I know whereof I speak. This is just tough titties and you'll have to hope you can reuse the characters/situations/sex scenes in something else. Usually you can.

In summary: plot is for geeks and story is easy. It happens all the time.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I tend to beat myself up for not being able to come up with nice, coherent plots, bu that might just be years of brainwashing and being told that plot wasn't an aspect of the story, it was the story. The problem with that, of course, is that it keeps you from meandering off into interesting little side avenues where you might find a totally better way to get Character A from Point B to Point C. So, in short, word.

Of course, my outlines, when the exist at all, tend to be the kind of rigid list I learned back in middle school - I, A, i), b).

[youngest-one.livejournal.com]

Er. That was me, forgetting to log in.